Me? Aggressive? SAY THAT TO MY FUCKING FACE

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."


~ Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Ha ha! Sorry about the title of this post (Me? Aggressive? SAY THAT TO MY FUCKING FACE). But, you know how it is....

Actually, with me, you prolly don't.

Anyway, today in hop-sital, we had a little thing called a Community Meeting. This is where all the facilitators of the Eating Disorders Program and all of the patients sit down in the Group Room, and give each other “feedback” about what the other group fucked up over the past week.

Well! Just prior to this morning’s Community Meeting was our Morning Snack. I was the last girl to walk into the kitchen, and as soon as I saw a yogurt sitting at my station on the counter, I turned around and walked right back out again, to grab my Lactaid from my locker. When I had returned and had swallowed the necessary pills, I went and grabbed my snack off the counter.

 Aryan Nation Tiana was waiting for me. “Kage,” she said, in that pseudo-saccharine counselor’s voice of hers. “There are some grapes in your bowl that aren’t looking too good. So there is another bowl right here, if you’d like to pick out the grapes that are inedible, you can exchange them with these ones.”

“Haha! I have to exchange grape for grape?” I snorted.

“Mmmm, mmmm, yes,” Aryan Nation Tiana nodded, therapeutically.

I paused. “Are you serious?”

“Mmmm, mmm hmmmm, yes,” she nodded again, and I turned back to the grapes with a sigh. I couldn’t STAND that pseudo-saccharine counselor’s response to everything anyone says, EVER, and Aryan Nation Tiana was the worst for it. She would say that crap to absolutely anything.

Me: Aryan Nation Tiana, your house is on fire, and your kids are trapped inside!

Aryan Nation Tiana: Mmmm, mmm hmmmmm, yes, thank-you for sharing that with us, Kage. Mmmmm. Very courageous of you, mmm hmmmm.

Anyway. I had to take out all the shitty grapes and replace them with good ones from another bowl. When I was done, I was able to take my grapes, yogurt and Rice Krispie square into the Dining Room, and sit down with everyone else.

To cut a long story short, I couldn’t cram the food down my gob fast enough to be finished before snack time was up, and I think we all know what happens to naughty anorexics who don’t finish their food on time.

Fecking Ensure!.

I saw Aryan Nation Tiana stand and start to walk towards me, and was about to cram the whole Rice Krispie square in my mouth so she couldn’t Ensure! me, but she was too quick.

“Kage,” she said, from the other side of the room. “Put it down.”

 I gave her a ‘what the fuck?’ kind of look, but I hesitated. She gave me a quick smile and said it was okay, just put it down, and I, in my infinite stupidity, put it down.

Now, then. NOW, THEN. When she said it was okay, I got the impression that IT WAS OKAY, that she was acknowledging the fact that I had been late coming into snack cuz I had to do the goddamn currency exchange on my fucking grapes. So instead of cramming the Rice Krispie square in my mouth, I put it down.

Never, EVER trust an Aryan Nation Nutritionist!

She told the new girl and I to stay in our seats while the other patients cleared the room. Then she turned to both of us, and told us that we would be Ensuring!.

“What?” I cried. “What kind of horse shit is that?”

She sat down beside me with a sigh, and I started the great Ensure! Debate of 2010, reasoning that I shouldn’t be served moldy fucking grapes if it was gonna come out of MY alloted eating time to exchange them, and that I shouldn’t have to Ensure!, and...

...and right in the middle of my rambling, she just turned away from me, and started talking to the new girl.

Stunned, I cocked my head to the side, like a puzzled dog. Did that really just happen? I wondered, too amazed to be angry.

YET.

I looked at the glass of Ensure!, sitting on the table.You, I thought bitterly. You’ve a nerve, showing your face round here.

I didn’t touch it, though. I waited.

With Aryan Nation Tiana breathing down her neack, the new girl slowly started to sip her Ensure!, so Aryan Nation Tiana turned back to me, and my untouched glass of Ensure!.

“Kage! I can see you’re still struggling,” she said pointedly.

“I wasn’t actually done speaking when you just left there, Tiana,” I snapped.

“Mmmm, mmm hmmmm, yes, well, I have to deal with both of you, don’t I, Kage? It’s not all about you,” she said, just as Lynn, another facilitator, sat down on the other side of the new girl.

“Is it all about me now?” I asked innocently.

She stared at me, hard. “Drink the Ensure!,” she said tightly, a crack finally showing in her pseudo-saccharine demeanor.

“And if I don’t?” I glared at her mutinously.

“Then you’ll be asked to leave the Program,” she said smugly.

Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, I thought, and I grabbed the glass of Ensure! off the table and slammed it back. Then I scraped my chair back and walked away, leaving my dishes and unfinished food for Aryan Nation Tiana to clean up.

And it was in this chipper state of mind that I entered into the aforementioned Community Meeting! Hooray!

I’m sorry, what’s that, Head Counselor Lisa? What do I think about the facilitators, and how well they are doing their jobs?

We-he-he-hell! Where shall I BEGIN?

And so, I ripped into them. I suggested that perhaps vegetarian clients should be served VEGETARIAN FOOD, NOT PIG, and that perhaps they could NOT serve us moldy food - or, barring something quite so extreme, they shouldn’t penalize US for the time wasted having to pick out the moldy grapes and replace them, one by one. And when Mumbles brought up the small matter of their misleading us about our goal weights, telling us one number to get us in here and then changing it once we were in, I wholeheartedly backed her up, saying that I didn’t appreciate being duped into joining this Program, either.

Well. As it turns out, my anger was not as well concealed as I thought. (Which was, admittedly, not at all). Once all was revealed, from myself and others, we were silently dismissed for lunch, and the facilitators closed the door behind us.

UH OH!

After lunch, all the patients were rounded up again, and made to participate in something called a 'Fishbowl'. Basically, we switched roles with the facilitators, and we sat behind the two-way mirror, and listened in on their staff meeting, while they addressed the events of that morning.

Specifically, the bullying that they had endured!

I rolled my eyes from behind the two-way glass. Here we go, thought I.

They complained about all of us, but I was the only girl to be mentioned by name.

“It was just like, is it my fault that your pizza had meat on it?” (one of them) said. “And we are only human, after all. They can’t cut us a little bit of slack?”

Nods of agreement all around. Then, in a totally orchestrated jump to my defense, Aryan Nation Tiana jumped to my defense!

“Mmm, mmm hmmm, I have to say that I must commend Kage on her courage in this situation,” she said, nodding sagely. “To resist the temptation to purge under such difficult circumstances is truly a testament to her strength of character.”

Did I buy tickets to this play? I wondered. It BLOWS.

We had to endure another ten minutes of this crap, before they had us all switch, and we had to sit in the Group room, while the facilitators sat behind the glass and listened to us.

Right off the bat, Manic Butterfly picked the meeting up and ran away with it, saying that the facilitators were speaking specifically about her, that she was such a burden to everyone and she should just leave, no one would care if she died right now, etc, etc. Any chance at a productive meeting died a slow, painful death right in front of us. No one could get a word in edgewise, least of all me, whom I actually think they really were referring to in their meeting.

I managed to wrestle the last 30 seconds of the meeting away from Manic Butterfly, and said as quickly and as loudly as I could for the mic to pick up, ”I apologize for being aggressive this morning. For being the other aggressive person this morning,” I amended hastily, as Manic Butterfly opened her mouth to protest that actually, they meant her. “I was angry at Aryan Nation Tiana for Ensuring! me, then you asked me what I thought and it all just came out. However, if I may just point out, you keep telling us not to hold stuff in, not to let it sit and fester, to express ourselves, our anger and our frustration. So I am a little confused to why we have all been brought in here to be reprimanded for speaking our minds this morning. Anyway, thanks for coming out everyone, please tip your waitress. Good night!”

I had more, A LOT more, to say, but the time was up, and the meeting was over. Grrrrr! I had so many scathing points to make, too. Damn you, Manic Butterfly!

It didn’t occur to me until almost bed time tonight that hey, wait a tic - my actions today had actually been the very opposite of what I was supposed to be working on, which was to stop fighting the Program every goddamn step of the way. This afternoon, I not only fought the Program, I threw a drink in it’s face, then slept with it’s wife. And then I set it’s house on fire.

And now I am left to wonder, once again - why must I always fight the process? Why can’t I just accept the fucking help and get better?